Principle
The CEO should be the most critical person in the company, not the investor
If you, as an investor or board member, are the one spotting the problems, treat it as a negative signal on the CEO.
Use who raises problems first in board conversations as a diagnostic of founder quality.
Principle
Founder is not a role; drop the title because it implies privilege
Titles should describe duties; founder and co-founder titles are anti-meritocratic and should not be used internally.
Replace founder titles with functional roles and hold founders to the same performance bar as everyone else.
Principle
Team design: drive the company with chip-on-shoulder maniacs, balanced by pragmatists
Put high-drive, chip-on-shoulder people at the center, but deliberately balance them with pragmatists.
When mapping your team, count drivers and stabilizers and correct imbalance in either direction.
Principle
Food companies built on novel ingredients need to be vertically integrated
When a product depends on a novel ingredient, owning the ingredient maker is the natural structure, because neither side can scale alone.
If your differentiation rests on a proprietary input, plan from day one to own or control its production.
Principle
The founding team rarely scales to the promised land
Expect the founding team to change with each stage and plan for it rather than treating it as failure.
Revisit whether each founding team member fits the next stage at every major scaling transition.
Principle
Price the round so the investor clearly wins: rich but not too rich
At early stages, set valuation where you would invest yourself; alignment is worth more than the marginal dilution.
Before accepting a term sheet, underwrite the deal as if you were the investor; if you would not take it, you are pricing too rich.
Principle
Bureaucracy is the natural gravity of growth; the CEO's job is to fight it
Treat bureaucracy as a default force that must be actively countered as the company grows.
Make fighting bureaucracy an explicit CEO responsibility with visible commitments, not an occasional cleanup.
Principle
Brands are built by time and consistency, and are asymmetrically fragile
Brand value compounds only with years of consistency, yet can be lost fast through a quality slip; guard both.
Fix your brand identity and quality bar early, then resist the urge to change them; treat any quality compromise as a threat to the whole asset.
Principle
If the leader has to pick up the phone to fix the product, he is the wrong leader
Choose categories, and appoint leaders, where the person in charge can personally diagnose and fix the product.
Before committing to a venture, test whether you could personally fix the product when it breaks; if not, either build that depth first or choose another category.
Principle
Post-exit investing is an allocation-access game that rewards charisma, not operator edge
A founder's exit wealth does not transfer his edge into investing; the investing game's scarce skill is winning allocations, which is a different skill.
Before moving into investing post-exit, ask what the scarce skill in that game is and whether you have it; do not assume operating success is the edge.
Principle
Operators need short feedback loops; investing's five-year loop starves them
Match your role to the feedback-loop length you thrive on; operators wired for fast loops will be miserable in long-loop roles.
Assess candidate roles (investor, board member, operator) by how quickly your decisions produce feedback, and choose accordingly.
Principle
CPG unit economics should work fast; raise big money only for acquisitions
A CPG brand should grow on profitable sales and debt; outside equity is for acquisitions, not operations.
Model CPG unit economics before raising; if they do not work quickly, fix the product and pricing rather than raising more.
Principle
Design the org for speed and knowingly pay the duplication cost
Pick one primary design objective for the org; if it is speed, accept the inefficiency that comes with decentralization.
Name the single objective your org design optimizes for, and stop penalizing the costs that objective requires.
Principle
A crystal-clear brand identity makes marketing easy: hammer the same points
Invest heavily in defining brand identity before launch so marketing becomes execution and repetition, not invention.
Write down the brand's values, position and product promise before spending on marketing; then judge every campaign on whether it hammers those points.
Principle
Experience makes people reason by analogy and skip the dumb question
Weight reasoning ability and drive over experience; experience's hidden cost is analogy-thinking.
In interviews, probe whether a candidate asks basic why questions or only cites what worked at their last company.
Principle
Resentment and pain tolerance are fuel only when channeled into the work
A chip on the shoulder is a powerful motivator only if it has a productive outlet; otherwise it damages the person.
If you run on a chip on your shoulder, make sure your role gives it a productive outlet; a passive role may turn it inward.
Principle
A wide span of control keeps the CEO close to problems
Many direct reports trade per-person development time for visibility and faster information flow.
If information reaches you slowly, consider widening your span of control and hiring leaders who need direction, not management.